


Sanctuary

by diabolica



Series: Safe Places [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-02
Updated: 2009-11-02
Packaged: 2021-02-26 09:09:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22406218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diabolica/pseuds/diabolica
Summary: She might not have been the last person he expected to find on his doorstep, but she was certainly near the bottom of the list.
Relationships: Andromeda Black Tonks/Ted Tonks
Series: Safe Places [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1612486
Kudos: 3





	Sanctuary

**Author's Note:**

> With love and kisses to AmyLouise, my dialect coach and all-round reality checker.

She might not have been the _last_ person Ted expected to find on his doorstep, dressed in robes in the middle of fucking Croydon—what was she playing at?—but she was certainly near the bottom of the list. He’d not heard from her in weeks, long enough that he had almost convinced himself it didn’t matter. Long enough that he’d started to forget all the things he meant to say to her: about blood, about tolerance. About her family.

When he opened the door, she smiled. He had once believed she only ever smiled that way at him, and he almost buckled right there. His first thought was that she looked just the same. She smelled the same, too—that perfume that had got into all her clothes, that emanated from her skin and hit him like a waft of Amortentia, which was unfair. He himself was different now; she should be too.

‘Teddy,’ she said.

She sounded relieved, pleased. A pulse of anger rose up into his throat. _You don’t get to call me that anymore,_ he very nearly said. He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the door frame.

‘Andromeda.’

If she had been hoping he would call her Andy and welcome her back, he could see he’d dispelled that notion. He gave her credit for not flinching. She only looked down, patting her pockets like she was looking for her fags. Except she usually kept her fags in that fussy purple handbag she always carried. He’d never seen her without it. She wasn’t carrying it now.

She seemed to rally and looked up again, but not at his face. She was looking past him, into the flat. ‘I—’ she began, then stopped. ‘Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

He laughed then, an ugly sound that he despised even as he made it. The absolute fucking cheek of her, showing up in her robes, looking bloody marvellous as ever, expecting to be invited in after she’d chucked him. Or good as, anyway.

‘Why? You want to have tea with a Mudblood, is that it?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘I have never called you that.’

‘Might as well have done,’ he said. He hadn’t meant to say any of this. When he had pictured seeing her again, it wasn’t a matter of her knocking on his door. She had thrown him off balance. There was something going on that he didn’t understand.

‘They’re my family, Teddy. I didn’t choose them. You can’t hold them against me.’

He looked to his right, not seeing the shabby passage, the yawning mouth of the stairwell—she had climbed five floors to tell him this?—rolling his eyes and snorting softly. She’d had a choice and she _had_ chosen them, whatever she said now.

‘Teddy.’

‘What do you want?’ He only opened his mouth enough to let the words slip out, forcing his voice to sound hard, untouchable. He should have been proud of himself for not showing her what she’d done to him. But when he looked back to tell her there was nothing else to say, ‘cos she’d made her feelings quite clear already and she should just go back to her super-posh bigot parents and let him get on with it, there were tears in her eyes.

‘I didn’t—’ she stammered, ‘I didn’t know where else to go, all right?’


End file.
